steps for critical success factors approach

The last time we have a discussion about this topic; it was reported by two of my classmates in management information system. Even though it was reported clearly (I think) the explanations given are still a bit unclear to me. But after reading the fourth assignment I was forced to have some thorough study or even comprehensive reading about the topic. But reading does help. It sure does.

Before I will jump into many conclusions and expounding into thousands of words what are the steps for critical success factors approach, I will discuss first what critical success factors really mean and where it first originated. The CSFs approach was applied in case studies carried out in the UK universities. It was applied also as a component of a strategic information management (SIM) methodology put forward by Wilson. The CSFs approach was combined with the value chain concept by Porter in order to form an information audit. The idea of identifying critical success factors as a basis for determining the information needs of managers was proposed by Daniel in 1961 but it was popularized by Rockart on 1979. The ideas were very simple: in any organization certain factors will be critical to the success of that organization, in the sense that, if objectives associated with the factors are not achieved, the organization will.

Critical success Factors define key areas of performance that are essential for the organization to accomplish its mission. Identifying the business drivers for change and the critical success factors is the most important element of any business transformations. John F. Rockart concludes that CSF’s are areas of activity that should receive constant and careful attention from management. Critical success factors are strongly related to the mission and strategic goals of your business project. Whereas the mission and goals focus on the aims and what is to be achieved. Critical success factors focus on the most important areas and get to the very heart of both what is to be achieved and how you will achieve it.

For most businesses, there are only a generally a limited number of areas – like sales or product development – which makes a business succeed. We can select critical success factor with insights and analysis. The success or failure of your business depends on how you approach your unique set of critical success factors. Understanding these factors and spending 100 percent attention to them is a sure way to add power to your efforts and jump start towards a new level of performance.



For better understanding about the steps on critical success factors approach, let’s go further than the business issues. Let us narrow our senses. The following definitions are mostly ideas based on the explanation given by myGoals.com.
Critical success factors cannot be specifically defined for the masses because success can be defined quite differently by each individual, and for the goal at hand. Therefore, in order to identify critical success factors, it is first necessary to come to terms with your own personal definition of success. Each individual’s own definition of will be influenced by several key factors:

•Success is subject to individual interpretation based on upbringing, past experiences, role models, personal motivations and goals. For some it might be to own a home in an upscale neighborhood, while for others it might be a career in the Peace Corps. Carefully contemplate your definition of success based on your values—not what your brother-in-law or Madison Avenue tells you it is. Your own definition of personal success directly influences critical factors leading to that success.

•Your view of success will change at various times throughout your life. For example, what might be deemed successful in college or on your first job is very different from successfully raising a family or comfortably retiring in the Caribbean. Your definition of success will continue to change, so don’t make the error of pursuing an outdated version of it. Success factors will change over time.

•Personal success is sometimes measurable and sometimes not. Accumulating a certain amount of wealth is one way to measure success, but it is not the only way; a successful marriage may be far more meaningful to many people and can only be measured by how the two partners feel about each other as the years go by.

•Very few people achieve success accidentally. Most people who achieve success first defined it then planned for it; they set a goal to achieve it. Critical success factors change with the goal.



Once you have defined personal success for yourself, your next step is to set goals that will lead you to your definition of success. You must create realistic, viable plans to achieve those goals. Follow your plans, be flexible, and enjoy the process. It’s not about keeping up with the Joneses. Here are five success factors that will directly affect your success in achieving any goal:


Critical Success Factor #1: Clearly Identify your Goal

The first step is to identify your special set of critical success factors. Clearly determine what the goal is. Be specific when identifying your factors. Test your assumptions by imagining a decline in a particular factor. How would that impact your business? And then imagine an improvement in that factor and think if what will its impact in you business.


Critical Success Factor #2: Identify the Obstacles

The next step is to establish a measurement scale for each critical factor. List all the hindrances standing between you and the goal. Identify resources, assistance, information or anything else that might be needed to reach the goal. As you're writing, don’t get discouraged by the obstacles– they’re absolutely necessary to help you with the next step in completing your plan.

Critical Success Factor #3: Know the Tasks Necessary to Overcome Each Obstacle

Set the baseline after establishing a measurement structure for a factor. Taking each obstacle one at a time, write one or more ways the obstacle could be overcome. These are tasks that will comprise your to-do list. Expect to have several tasks per obstacle.

Critical Success Factor #4: Assign Deadlines

Next is setting new goals. Create a gap between where you are and your baseline and your target for that factor. Assign a start and completion date to each task in the plan. It’s ok to be working on several different tasks at the same time, but don’t over do it. Be realistic.


Critical Success Factor #5: Follow the Plan

By the time to you've reached this step, you will have defined a goal plan. You have now defined a baseline and a target for each factor. Complete each task in succession. Revisit your goal plan often and make sure to use your reminder system to keep you on track. Use any idea generation process you are comfortable with. Develop several possible initiatives to raise the level of that factor. With luck your ideas will work together and harmonize in terms of impact or implementation requirements. If you generate challenging ideas, select the best option. Choose based on return on investment, required resources, scheduling conflicts, time to impact, total cost, and possibility of success in opposition to risk of failure. Depending on the specific factor, and the size of the gap, you may plan to close it in stages or shoot the gap all at once. Once you launch your gap closing initiatives, continually measure your results. Report your progress to participants and stakeholders and post it publicly.


If the success plan is too long or a little bit complicated, try to break it into several smaller more manageable plans. Do not rely on luck or things outside you control as part of the success plan. Be flexible enough; expect your success plan to change before you complete it. Circumstances change, unexpected events occur, and your plan should be updated to adapt to changes. Use planning software to help construct your plan and modify it regularly. Seek the input of others who have expertise in the area or who have completed similar goal. Reward yourself for practical success as significant milestone are accomplished.



To top it all, critical success factor was designed to help a business achieve personal success, regardless of how you chose to define it. It helps you select and pursue personally fulfilling goals; you create a clear, defined path to your own personal success. Critical path method is extremely effective tools for creating viable plans and keeping you on track. As what the saying goes, “you can’t mange what you can’t measure”. This tells us that the positive results don’t come easy and are driven by many factors besides management alignment. Because its human nature to revert the old comfortable ways.

As priorities change (and circumstances change), goals will change as well. Defining steps of approach provides a convenient, flexible, and easy way to manage your path to personal success. We encourage everyone to pursue their goals with passion. Personal success is yours alone to define, pursue, and achieve.

relationship between IS plan and business plan...

What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan?

What is really the nature between these two types of planning? We often identify their relationship for they both relates to businesses. Business plan and information systems plan are both decision making tools. They are quite related because they have the same purpose in which they prepare the business through planning to set out a convincing way to secure financing, internal or external or for the start-up or expansion of a business scheme. It has a goal which is to deliver the most valuable business information at the earliest time possible in the most cost effective manner.

But before I can put in plain words the nature of the relationship between the business plans and IS plan, I must first define what does these both means. Business plan as we all know is a formal statement or set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan reaching these goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach these goals. The business goals being attempted may be for profit which typically focuses on financial goals or non-profit which tend to focus service goals or focuses on maximizing profit. Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding the customer, client, tax payer, or larger community. Business plan may be internally focused which target immediate goals required to reach the peripheral goals and external focused which targets goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly external stakeholders. Having a formal, written business plan is so accepted as being crucial to success that there haven't been many studies or surveys to test this principle. If business plans were such a wonderful thing, there would be a significant and conclusive difference between businesses that have them and those that don't. Simply stated, business plan is a plan that sets out the future strategy and financial development of a business, usually covering a period of several years.

Information system plan on the other hand determines the sequence for implementing specific information systems. This kind of plan focuses on not only one information system but the entire suite of information systems for the enterprise. In lay mans term, information system plan is the end product of the information system project.

The nature relationship of the both plan is that without which there can be no exact view of the future plan of the company or shall we say it can give a hard time analyzing, solving or maybe in creating best plans for the company’s future.

Since business plan is one of the most important document of a company it is most frequently used by the managers and executives for internal planning. For a newly established business enterprise, the process of preparing a business plan serves a road map to the future by making entrepreneurs and the business owners itself think through their strategies. It can help in evaluating the basic business concepts; recognize the business limitations to avoid variety of mistakes. Thus, business plan serve as a blueprint or a guide in information systems planning.

The relationship between the two is that when the company is developing an information system plan which sometimes involves the whole organization, all members of the staff look at the overall organization to anticipate problems. This is where business plan completes the information system plan using the list of information systems needed, and many documents must be reviewed in which all the files are already been stated in the business plan. There are virtually no resources to help us set up what today’s business environment really demands. Since we are now living in a world where technologies are fast changing and the needs not just for good government services but also for better living would also continue to grow. But the sad part of it is that when the technology increases the need for new resources also increases but the availability of such resources decreases due to economic crisis. That is why effective use of information technology was viewed as a major approach that could assist government and companies in managing this change. It was also understood that well defined business planning and information system planning processes were critical success factor. That is why many companies particularly those large ones has developed a complete and inclusive technology planning procedure to boost technology project launch and approval. That is also the main reason why a continuous and ongoing planning system is really a must.

IS plan is an allied of business plan for when planning an information system, the staff under the planning team will review the strategic business plan for the company, including the statement of mission, goals, objectives and priorities that set business direction. They will ensure that the company information technology strategy is carried out and that the projects are appropriately targeted to support specific business strategies and ensures that the authorized projects are in line with business needs and direction. A common accepted theory is that for a business to survive and prosper it must be flexible and nimble. It is just like applying linear thinking to a non linear situation.

Writing a business plan without a planning system in place is a massive effort that is done very rarely. Many or mostly businesses write three to five year plan and update them annually. If a continual, ongoing process is in place, a written plan is not just important. Setting up an information system plan allows and sometimes forces the company to focus on strategy. But as we all see and as what I hear from those people living in a corporate world that a significant percentage of successful businesses don’t have written business plans. As professor Albert Shapero said, “Companies that plan do better than companies that don’t, but they never follow their plan.”

To sum it all up, information system plan is somehow connected to business plan in the development of the companies’ future success. Without which there will be possibilities that they can’t meet what the people needs for these two types of plan must work hand in hand. AJA…

hephep....HURI..

risks associated with business and IS/IT change..

Information technology performs the key role in the development not just the business itself, but also for the assurance that its strategic objectives are not in a risk by IT failures. Risk with business associated with IT/IS changes are increasingly a big issue on the business IT failure.

What are the risks? Since it plays such a significant part in most project approaches and functions, business personnel must think of some possible risk associated in IS change.

An expense risk happens when there are some transactions to be made and the company fails to provide enough funds to support the investment made in IT.

Access or Security Risk, in many countries, it is required by law that the personal data must be kept private. Due to the increase demand of IT and change in IS in most businesses, revealing of personal data is such a big risk for it will be available to those without appropriate authority which will turn out to loss of privacy.

Integrity Risk happens when some data are not anymore reliable for the reason that they are incomplete and not accurate. In this day and age, we are experiencing this kind of problem through internet. I have heard lots of rumors that information in internet now is not anymore reliable. The reliability of information in IT is such a great menace for it causes IT failure.

An infrastructure risk takes place when the organization does not have enough IT infrastructure and systems that can efficiently support the needs of the business. Changes in information technology can also be the cause of system failure which results to damage in business development.

Project ownership risk occur when a company choose to change some of its strategies in IT/IS business plans and the future business IT project fails to meet its objectives through lack of liability and assurance and due to the new IT business approaches.

In changing business approaches especially in IS/IT, we need to deem some lists of risks and established some possible actions to this menace. We need to fully identify and know all information that needs to be protected and managed. Implement controls to cover the missing areas that expose the organization to a high level of risk.

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Many industries and organizations are facing difficulties in delivering effectively its IT services and add value to their diverse production procedure. Identifying some strategies or approaches in information technology will be a great contribution to the evolution of the industry and its information system as well.

Some best practices in information technology which can guide and support the management of IT resources are:

• Use an IT advisory board to oversee IT strategy and policy decisions. The board is the one who is responsible in strategic planning and making an IT policy. That is why having an IT advisory board compose of experienced staff which has adequate understanding in the recent technological environment will be uncomplicated to work, plan, and communicate more effectively with the IT director.

• Base IT decisions on bureau and City-wide strategic technology. Even though IT board can function alone in organizing and making plans, it will be a factor when they communicate and consult the government department and support the city-wide goals.

• Ensure that an IT customer service manager possesses excellent communication and
interpersonal skills. Knowledge in government business and project management is necessary for IT costumer service managers. They need these skills in balancing the needs, wants, limitations, and capabilities of both the government and IT department for the reason that they are the key players for managing resources and expectations for both the IT and government department.

• Monitor and report on the progress of the IT strategic plan. IT strategic plan should be evaluated at least once a year. And whatever the results, whether it is good or bad, the top management should do something for the improvement of the strategic plan or change the strategies as needed.

• Develop strong and broad competencies. The knowledge of IT staff guarantees that their skills are good enough to achieve the objective of the organization. They should be trained in operating businesses and communication skills. Performance appraisals can also help in developing strong and wide competencies for it encourages the staff to work harder.

• Recognize the customer as an important resource. Costumer is one of the important resources in businesses. A costumer maximizes the chance of the improvement of the business.

• Measure performance and use the results to initiate improvements and change. Measuring performance will indicate areas that need improvement, build credibility and prove to the government department that the Information Technology improves business processes. It also measures the costumer satisfaction.

These practices will help develop the leadership of the information technology department and contribute to the successful management of Information technology resources.

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